Tech Tips

Spice up man pages, perform keyword searches, and create a logo or mix audio at the command line.

Colorize man Pages

Linux man pages are an integral part of Linux folklore. Even seasoned
users have to refer to man pages every once in a while. Wouldn't it
be much more fun if man pages were a little colorful? If you run
a graphical X desktop, it isn't much trouble to add some color to the
otherwise very technical and curt manuals. Simply copy the contents of the
file called XTerm in the app-defaults directory to your .Xdefaults file.
The following replaces the .Xdefaults file entirely:

$ cp /usr/share/X11/app-defaults/XTerm ~/.Xdefaults

Edit the file and uncomment these lines (or create them if they aren't
in your particular file). Change the colors from yellow and red to your
favorite colors if yellow and red do not suit you:

*VT100*colorULMode: on
*VT100*colorUL: yellow
!*VT100*italicULMode: on
*VT100*underLine: off
! Uncomment this to use color for the bold attribute
*VT100*colorBDMode: on
*VT100*colorBD: red

Enjoy the colorful man pages!

—Girish Venkatachalam

Keyword Search in Firefox

Firefox is a great browser, but you already knew that, right? Firefox's
keywords facility can be used for a neat search trick. It is
best used for a directed search engine that digs specific data—for
example, a Bugzilla search, IMDb search, LXR search or
Marcel/wine search (www.wine-searcher.com), and so
on. Here are the steps:

Go to a site that offers a simple search facility (for example, IMDb, LXR
or
your local Bugzilla).

Place the cursor within the search box.

Right-click, and select Add a Keyword for this Search.

Give your new search shortcut a name.

Give your new search shortcut a short keyword (for example, I use bz
for my Bugzilla search and lxr for LXR).

That's it.

To try out your new keyword search shortcut, open a new tab (Ctrl-T),
place the cursor at the location bar (Ctrl-L), type your keyword
followed by the search term(s)—for example, assuming you added keyword
bz for the search at bugzilla.mozilla.org, then typing bz
95849
in the location bar will show you this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95849.

This is an ideal way to use a search engine that digs through some
specific data.

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